Every drop of water that has ever been used for domestic purposes—the waterworks of Cairo and Alexandria are innovations only of yesterday—has, with the exception of the small quantity conveyed in goat-skins by men, been brought up out of the river and canals by women. Their custom has been to carry it on their heads in large earthen jars, called goollehs. These are so large that they are capable of being formed into rafts, which you often meet upon the river, with two men upon each steering and punting them along. This is the way in which they are taken from the places, where they are manufactured, to be distributed to the towns and villages along the banks of the stream. Each weighs when full, as near as I could tell by lifting one, about forty pounds. Wherever you may be you see the women trooping down to the river-bank with these jars on their heads to fetch water. Arrived at the water’s edge, each woman tucks her short and scanty skirts between her legs, and, walking a step or two into the stream, fills her goolleh. She then faces round to the bank, and sets it down on the ground. The next move is to face back again to the stream, and wash her feet. When ready to depart she receives the assistance of the one who will go next into the water in placing the full jar on her head. The last of the troop has no assistance. With forty pounds weight on their heads they walk up the steep bank, and, perhaps, a mile or two off to the village, making as light of it as if it were no more than a chignon. The practice of carrying these weights on the head gives an erectness to the figure, and a prominency to the chest, which nothing else could produce.
Though I have at times smoked out a cigar while watching an incessant stream of these women coming down to, and going up from, the watering-place, I never heard one speak to another. I suppose they reserve what they have to say till they can say it unobserved by the bearded sex. Nor did I ever see one of them cast a glance upon a stranger. I quite believe what a native told me of them—that it would be regarded as a portent, if one of the very poorest class were in the least to commit herself in this way. I once saw one of my companions—a tall, good-looking young fellow—walk up to a damsel as good-looking as himself, who had filled her goolleh, and set it on the edge of the stream till she had washed her feet. As she turned round for it, he lifted it for her, and placed it on her head. I narrowly watched her face. She ought to have been somewhat taken by surprise, for she knew not that he was behind her; but of this there was no indication. She did not look at him, or move a feature: there was no apparent consciousness of any one being present. The instant the jar was on her head, she walked away just as she would have done, had it been her sister who had lifted it for her.
One is astonished at the mountains of broken crockery, or pottery, which mark the sites of the ancient cites. That well nigh all the water used in Egypt, for so many thousands of years, has had to be carried in these earthen jars—for there is no wood in Egypt to make bowls and buckets—and that the cooking utensils of the mass of the people must be made of the same fragile material—for Egypt, except in times of unusual prosperity, has no metals cheap enough for this purpose—will account for no inconsiderable part of the accumulations. These shards have gone a long way towards forming the barrows in which lie buried Abydos, Memphis, Esné, Edfou, Thebes, Dendera, and scores of other places. The importance, in its day, of any one of these ages-ago-effaced cities may be roughly estimated by observing the magnitude of the barrow in which it is buried. The mounds at Alexandria—and even already at modern Cairo—are of surprising dimensions. Had they brought up the water from the river in wooden buckets, which would have decayed, or had they cooked in metal utensils—the materials of which, when they became unserviceable for cooking, would have been turned to some other account—these mounds would have been less conspicuous objects than they are now.
CHAPTER XLVII.
WANT OF WOOD IN EGYPT, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.
The trees of his forest shall be few, that a child may write them.—Isaiah.
Egypt has no woods or thickets. It would hardly possess a single tree without the care of man. The few it has would soon perish if that care were intermitted. Even the palm, which we regard as the tree of the desert, cannot exist unless it be supplied with water. The species of the trees one meets with commonly in Egypt do not exceed half-a-dozen. They are the large-leaved acacia, the small-leaved thorny acacia, the tamarisk, a variety of the Indian fig, the palm, and, occasionally in Upper Egypt, the dôm palm.
From this dearth of wood follow several obvious consequences, which may be worth noting. First, all the houses of the lower class, that is, of the great mass of the people of Egypt, must be built of crude, or sun-dried brick. There is no wood for posts and planks, or to burn brick for such folk as they. This obliges them to live in houses that are singularly mean; and, according to our ideas, insufficient for their purpose. They can only have a ground-floor, for no ceilings can be made without wood. Nor, for the same reason, can they have any roofs, there is no wood for rafters. Nor, if they could manage to get the rafters, would they be able to get the fuel for burning the tiles. It follows that only a part of what ought to be the roof can be covered in, and that in the rudest way, for protection against what heaven may send in the way of heat, or cold, or wet. This partial covering is very ineffectual. It consists of a few palm-leaves, or of the stalks of the millet and maize, laid horizontally from wall to wall; upon this wheat and barley straw is generally piled till it has been consumed by the donkeys, goats, camels, and buffaloes. Such is the rule; a real serviceable roof being the exception. These roofless low walls, which are the house, must also be floorless, for there is no wood either for plank-flooring, or for burning floor-bricks. Then what does duty for the floor must be dust. This makes every house a flea-preserve.
A further consequence is, that within these floorless, roofless, windowless, doorless mud enclosures there can be no such thing as furniture—nothing to sit upon, nothing to stow anything away in, nothing to put anything upon; not a cupboard, a chair, or a table. But this matters little to a people who can always sit, and sleep on the dry ground; and who have nothing to stow away. Everywhere I saw men, and sometimes even women, sleeping out of doors, even in mid-winter.
The same cause obliged the old Egyptians also to build, for all classes, with little, or no, wood. We have just seen that the rubbish heaps of their cities are so vast as in many instances to have completely buried the temples, which, together with many objects of Egyptian art, have thus been preserved for us. Of course this could not have occurred had wood been as largely used by them, as it is by ourselves, in domestic and public architecture. This was, also, one cause of the massiveness and grandeur of their style of architecture.